IBM Ranked #1 on The Graph500 Supercomputing List

IBM supercomputers have taken the top three spots on the latest Graph500 list released today during the Supercomputing Conference (SC’13) in Denver, Colorado. The biannual list ranks high-performance computing systems on the basis of processing massive amounts of Big Data.

The top three positions have been awarded to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia, Argonne National Laboratory’s Mira and Forschungszentrum Juelich’s (FZJ) JUQUEEN, which all use IBM Blue Gene/Q systems. Blue Gene supercomputers have ranked #1 on The Graph500 list since 2010 with Sequoia topping the list three consecutive times since 2012. IBM also was the top vendor on the most recent list, with 35 entries out of 160.

The Graph500 was established in 2010 by a group of 50 international HPC industry professionals, academics, experts and national laboratory staff. There are five key industries that the Graph500 tries to address with its benchmark which include cybersecurity, medical informatics, data enrichment, social networks, and symbolic networks. All of these industries process and analyze large amounts of data, which is also why the Graph500 looks at graph-based data problems, since this a foundation of most analytics work, and the ability of systems to process and solve complex problems. The Graph500 was established as a complement to the TOP500 list, which ranks supercomputers based on performance speed via a benchmark called the LINPACK.